Best Ecommerce and B2C Posts of 2012

In this second, end-of-year roundup, we offer you here some of our best posts of 2012 on ecommerce best practices and strategies. We recall a number of posts on ecommerce and email marketing, a few on SEO and ecommerce, and one or two on ecommerce social media marketing. We hope you find this helpful as you wind down your year and solidify your plans for 2013.

Ecommerce Planning

At the start of 2012, we asked: Do You Have an Email Marketing Plan for 2012? This is a good place to begin this recap, and a good place for you to start your own review. We noted then, that a “well-defined email marketing plan that includes email strategy, review, focus, content, and budget ensures your regular mailings are deployed on schedule, and allows you to allocate time for implementing campaigns that will meet your strategic objectives.” Did you lay out such a plan? Did you implement? What worked? What didn’t? Now is the time to look again, and tweak that plan for a successful year of email marketing in 2013!

Ecommerce Best Practices

Still on email, this post offers a variety of fundamentals and easy-to-follow tips to generate more e-Commerce business from your email marketing! In a recent research study, Return Path, an email certification provider, evaluated 45 different online retailers with some interesting findings. These are discussed here as well. If you missed it the first time, we encourage you to check this out now.

Duplicate content is a particularly difficult problem for many ecommerce web sites, especially those that are large store fronts who are not actually manufacturers themselves. If you run a large online store selling some commodity product, for example, when uploading the products to your shopping cart, you may use pictures and descriptions from the manufacturers. of course, your competitors are most likely uploading the very same pictures and descriptions to their sites. You all have the same content, often including the manufacturers as well. So, how do you stand out from the herd? Read this important 2012 post on how to avoid duplicate content on ecommerce sites.

Remember When Froogle Was Free? Google Shopping, once called Froogle, then Google Base, is now called Google Products. In this post we explained that it would soon no longer be a free service and that has come to pass. Read this post for an intro to Google Products and let us know if you need help with this very important ecommerce strategy for 2013!

In this post we touch on the increasingly significant topic of structured data. We will post more about this in 2013 but it’s time for your ecommerce site to look into encoding your products with “rich snippets” or other accepted forms of structured data. Watch this space for more in the coming weeks!

Is your ecommerce business taking full advantage of email marketing to increase your sales and profits? “Ecommerce businesses should concentrate more of their efforts on […] search and e-mail rather than social media,” declared a September Forrester report after determining “that less than 1% [of orders] could be traced back to social networks like Facebook or Pinterest.” To learn a few common tactics to get the most out of your ecommerce emails, read, 30% of Ecommerce Repeat Purchases Come From Email Marketing!

Despite the inherent strength of email marketing as shown in the above-mentioned post, and as much as we believe in email marketing at OpenMoves, in 2013 you should consider a serious, relevant social media marketing plan, if you have not already. In the words of Eran Sion, eCommerce Director EMEA, “We discovered that […] In order to make people talk about your product, there should be a true dialogue between the brand and the consumer. And social media is the best platform to engage in this kind of dialogue.” Read how social media can support your b2c marketing efforts.

Don’t Just Sell – But Stay in Touch with Your Customers Anyway!This is a good time of year to connect in a friendly, community-oriented way with your customers, and to send email that will likely be welcomed! Read our post on businesses sending greeting cards.

A Hopeful Note

One of our finest posts of 2012 was not directly linked to ecommerce or marketing at all. But it is a hopeful note with which I’d like to close 2012. Here Eitan Chitayat applies the power and tactics of online marketing to the lofty goal of Spreading Peace with Social Media!

And with that, we wish you a healthy, happy, successful, and most of all, peaceful 2013.